


The Dream

by FirozTaverbi



Series: That Thorns Have Roses [1]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe, Childbirth, Gen, Mentions of Death, That Thorns Have Roses, dads!au, mentions of self harm, some gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-27 23:49:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6305194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FirozTaverbi/pseuds/FirozTaverbi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It comes back to him, in some form or another, in those quiet hours when the past and present blur, and he is alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dream

In my dream I am standing on the brickwork boundary of the railway bridge, gazing impassively down at the valley below. It's night time, but the sky isn't dark enough to obscure the streaks of grass and shale beneath me. Sheep graze. I see the grey speck of a rabbit, cottontail flashing as it hops between shrubs and wildflowers. I am naked, but not cold. The wind lifts my hair, caresses my scalp with gentle fingertips. Behind me I hear the creak of the forest, my forest, dark and welcoming. I could fall backwards into an embrace of daffodils, their soft petals soothing my chapped, mottled skin. My arms and legs bleed, but I don't feel that old sting and tingle of a clean weeping cut. I am removed from myself. I am calm.

Raindrops shiver from the sky. I look down at my feet, surrounded by cigarette stubs and broken bottles. Somewhere far away I can hear old pop songs speckled with the familiar static of poor quality cassette tapes. Two young children scream and laugh and cry in the valley, so drunk they tumble over one another, their limbs belonging to some other dancing creature. One of them falls, his damp bubblegum hair flowering around his head. He weeps, clutching his distended stomach.

Time moves slowly. I am fat. Fatter and fatter, the heavy presence of a human being inside me shifting my centre of gravity over the edge of the bridge. I teeter precariously, but I never quite fall.

The child in the valley looks at me with his clear blue eyes. He says in a quivering voice; "Is this what becomes of me?"

I say blandly, "You never had a future anyway." The baby inside me slithers down my leg and hits the bricks. Crack. It hangs by the umbilical cord, like a condemned criminal.

The child in the valley holds out his arms. They shake. He shouts in a voice that is full of pain and isolation and a crushingly inexplicable love he cannot understand, "I'll catch her!" But it's already dead.

A dawn train, horn ricochetting around the valley, hits my forest and leaves the corpses of my foster families behind. I listen out for an echo of their love but it never comes. The child in the valley lies in his own vomit. It fills his lungs. He coughs but his body is too weak to move, and that is where he drowns, the cottontail rabbits sniffing the grass on his head and digging burrows between his lifeless fingertips.

I feel numb. Down drops the baby, and as she falls I see her big saltwater eyes staring back at me. They say; "I don't understand." They say; "Why did you do this to me?"


End file.
